Piller’s SIMPLY FREE..

.. is a range of packaged cooked meats, cold cuts if you prefer.

The packaging is quite nice, soft pastel natural colours, and the words ‘Simply Free’ in a larger text size than any other text on the packaging. Yes, this looks to be a product which you could serve up to your family, basking in the knowledge that you had done them a great favour.

What is Piller’s ‘Simply Free’ free from exactly. I can tell you from the more wording on the packing.. ALLERGENS. It gets better all of the time, doesn’t it.

The product, bearing in mind that it is a meat type is free from:

• Gluten
• Milk
• Peanuts
• Tree nuts
• Mustard
• Sesame
• Egg
• Fish
• Soy
• Sulphites

I don’t know about you, but I would not expect to find ANY of the above list in a slice of ham or Salami. The funniest is ‘FISH’. Imagine that, no FISH in a ham/Salami product.

Piller’s is having us on because the list of ingredients on the back of the Salami pack reads:

• Pork
• Sea Salt
• Cane Sugar
• Spices
• Cultured Celery Extract
• Garlic
• Starter Culture
• Smoke

For those of you who don’t know, the Celery extract is SODIUM. Starter Culture could be anything at all, and Spices is also a little vague.

By weight, the percentage of SODIUM in the Salami product is 17%, and for the ham, it is 18%.

So we now know that Piller’s cooked meats, cold cuts don’t have anything that one would expect NOT to be in there, but it has a nice healthy helping of the big S, SODIUM.

The only saving grace is that they were purchased at around half of the suggested retail price. Will I be buying them again?

Sorry, Mr. Piller’s Fine Foods of Waterloo, Ontario, but the answer is a resounding NO. My decision is not based upon the product itself as I have tasted worse, but because you are trying to mislead the consumer into believing that it is a better product than others, and I very much doubt that this could be substantiated in any lab or consumer tests..

Informative but deceitful..

This is the state of food labelling in Canada.

I watched CBC’s Marketplace last night. It was all about lousy labelling. You know the type, full of health claims, little logos which suggest a healthy option. They had 10 products tested, and the #1 culprit was a meat product.

Maple Leaf’s ‘Natural Selections’ came under fire over wording on the front of the packaging. There is an ingredient on the front which seems innocuous enough called ‘cultured celery extract’ which is………….. NITRITES.

It urns out that there is as much nitrite in Natural Selections as there is in the cheaper Maple Leaf cold cuts, so how can it be healthier?

Maple Leaf and most other food producers know that the average shopper will be caught out by false or deceitful claims if the right kind of wording and logos are applied to the front of the packaging. Even the colour of the packaging can make a difference.

But wait.. Is it entirely the fault of the food producers? Well, the deceit is for sure, but not the food stuff or what is added to make it last in packaging.

If you give families the choice of a grocery store which always has a good choice of food stuffs always available regardless of the time of day, or run the gauntlet of having to shop in maybe five different small specialized stores but not always get what is required, they will choose the large grocery store almost every time.

The ONLY way to package processed food stuffs or any foodstuffs such that they last is to add PRESERVATIVES.

Foodstuff manufacturers try to ensure that their products will still look like foodstuffs when the package is opened. The manufacturers do their best to keep it properly before shipping, the shipping people do their best to keep it properly before delivery to stores, stores do their bets to store and display properly before it is sold, but after it is sold, there is no telling what will happen to it.

There are so many shoppers who are ill-informed about how to store foodstuffs. It is amazing that more people aren’t poisoned daily.

Food is bought at the beginning of a shopping trip and then left in a vehicle for an unspecified amount of time while other store types are visited, but if these people are challenged, 99% will say that it should be ok. When the foodstuff finally makes it back home, it may sit around for a while, and when it is finally put away, stuff that shouldn’t be put in a refrigerator often will be, and stuff not suitable for freezing will be put in the freezer. All of the people will expect the foodstuff to still look and taste like it would if it was absolutely fresh.

It is the way that people want to shop and sheer ignorance and unwillingness to learn how to store food properly that forces food manufacturers to add ingredients which will give us all cancer long term.

In North America, there is no way to turn back the clock. The entire food process is so entrenched, and all of the small food retailers who did have the knowledge and skills are gone.

To anybody reading this from outside of North America, take note. If you don’t want to subject your family to medical conditions which may terminate lives early, don’t buy processed food. Stay loyal to the small corner store which still sells preservative free food.

Avoid processed meats, mass produced bread in polythene bags, anything with health claims all over it. Instead of buying ready prepared meals, make them up yourself. It can be fun, and is much better for you. 

More on ‘Cold cuts’..

As discussed in another post, cold cuts sold in packages have an excessive amount of preservatives in them. Look on the packs.

OK, so maybe you think that getting cold cuts from the deli counter of your favoured grocery store will be better. Think again, because it is a false assumption.

Metro deli counters sell cold cuts which do not have the harsh taste of the packaged stuff. I assume that there is some preservative in them, but just not as much.

This is NOT true of Loblaws deli counter. They have TWO variants for sale. The cheaper shaved cold cuts are every bit as bad as the packaged hams, chicken, turkey etc. If you want nitrate free cold cuts, you have to pay between 80c to a dollar more for the more brightly labelled meats.

None of the items on a deli counter have labels showing what is in them, and NEVER assume that they are better for you. Ask to taste a piece first before committing to buying.

An update to the previous post..

I looked at all of the packs of cold cuts in my local Loblaws store here in London Ontario. Apart from two, Maple Leafs Natural Selections and a Presidents Choice Prosciutto, all of the other packs of ham, salami and similar products produced by:

• Ziggy’s
• Piller’s
• Mastro
• President’s Choice
• Schneider’s

contained the following preservatives:

• Sodium Phospate
• Salt
• Carageenan
• Sodium Ascorbate
• Sodium Nitrate

You might think that the contents of the packages came off the same productions lines and were just packaged according to which retailer was going to sell them. There may well be some truth in this, but I do not know for sure.

What I do know is this. We are eating all kinds of crap.

Now for a question.

If Sodium Phosphate is a substitute for Sodium Nitrate, why do both sodium types appear in the SAME foodstuffs?

Food of this type should not hurt..

After a course of antibiotics for a Bronchitis infection, my mouth has become fairly sensitive to some food stuff. I am taking medication to get over it but progress is slow. So I have to look for something to eat that is mild.

Oh dear. Marmite and East Indian dishes are off, as are fries which have been lightly coated with salt and vinegar. Bread-crumbed stuff will have to go as the crumbs will get into the corners of my mouth and irritate it. My favourite Rye bread will have to go on the back burner too. What a dilemma.

I know. I will have plain bread buttered toast and some Black Forest Ham, but without the English mustard which I always use on ham.

Big mistake. The buttered toast is fine but what the hell is in this ham? Well, apart from Pork, there is added salt and three types of Sodium preservative, unknown spices and colour fixer. Dammit, I have been giving my grand-daughter this stuff, but no more. Black Forest ham shouldn’t have this effect. My mouth and lips feel like they are on fire.

One of the ‘ingredients’, according to a website, has side effects which include swelling of the lips, tongue and mouth parts. Another is considered to be a carcinogenic. One of the Sodium products is used as an alternative to Sodium Nitrite, and yet both Sodium products are in there.

The same ingredients appear in the entire range of ham products from this one particular manufacturer, and they all have the same effect on me.

Are these people in cahoots with the medical professions, ensuring a steady queue of people who will need treatments for which the drug companies will fleece them?

I will be writing to the manufacturer and will report back on what they say. Stay tuned.. 

They call the process ‘plumping’

What they do is inject salt water into large chunks of meat, and the result is a nice piece of meat which feels springy to the touch, more tender. It can be done with any kind of meat, by the way.
Take a scrawny, aging chicken, put it out of its misery, pluck it, inject it and hey presto, one nice looking chicken, ready to be wrapped and sold as fresh. Nice job. Do the same with a side of bacon too. Turn it into good, succulent looking slices.
How do you tell that meat has been plumped? That’s easy.
When you cook the chicken, what looked like it could feed four people can now only reasonably feed three. Yes, it shrank as the injected water evaporated out during the cooking period. The only way to ensure that it doesn’t shrink too much is to seal the outside of the chicken in a sauté pan before committing it to a roasting dish, It helps seal in the salt water.
And the bacon? When you opened the pack, did it drip water out all over the counter top? That is some of the salt water, forced out by compression of the packs in their packing boxes. The longer that the bacon sits in transit, the more water will come out when the pack is opened. The rest comes out in the pan.
You may have struggled to fit the pieces of bacon into the pan at the start of cooking, but see how it has all shrunk to under half the surface area. The water has all but left the bacon, but much of the salt will most likely remain. One thing that you do not want to do is add more salt before eating.
So, how do you feel about this practice? Paying for an illusion, water that will evaporate before you get to serve the meat up to your family? Be happy in the knowledge that it may not have been your cooking methods which caused the Sunday roast to shrivel beyond all recognition.
Blame the scammers, the unscrupulous meat producers who will do anything to ensure that their profits stay high..